From The Independent last week:
If you had purchased £1,000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1,000 would have been worth £16.50, and £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1,000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily.
Yesterday saw the launch of the first phone based on Google’s Android platform – the HTC manufactured Dream G1 with T-Mobile as the carrier.
Like the first version of the iPhone there have been some strange decisions: Carrier-locked, non-standard headphone jack, poor Bluetooth implementation, no tethering, voice dialling, video capture (or playback outside YouTube on the G1), VoIP or Exchange support. Unlike the first generation iPhone there is no desktop synching or multi-touch (John Gruber makes an incisive-as-ever comment on this) but on the plus side there is 3G, a slide-out physical keyboard, MMS and cut-and-paste.
Apple will carry on improving the iPhone. In a couple of years I’m expecting perhaps a graphene-based ultracapacitor instead of a battery or fuel cell (try getting one of those on a plane), an OLED screen with tactile keyboard and integrated camera.
Alongside these patents that have yet to come to market, there are around 200 others on the iPhone and a lot of them are related to the all-important interface. A friend was struggling to find the silent mode due to the lack of the traditional:
Menu → Options → Sounds → Ringer → Silent → On
The moment I flicked the switch at the side of the iPhone to turn the ringer off, a look of burgeoning appreciation of the way Apple does things spread across her face. An annoyance I do have with this is not having an dedicated icon on the screen to indicate that the ringer is off but – like the lack of MMS, A2DP, video capture or SMS forwarding – this is easily solved with a software update.
Last Saturday I woke up at 7am (which is the middle of the night at the weekend as far as I’m concerned) and got the train across to Glasgow for the start of the penultimate stage of the Tour of Britian before catching up with some friends for lunch at Kember & Jones.
There were a good few hundred people milling around the start area despite the damp weather. I’m willing to bet that the numbers will have been swelled by the awesome performance of the British cyclists in Beijing and the subsequent increased media exposure. Geraint Thomas, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Newton all were racing while Mark Cavendish plumped for riding the Tour of Missouri.
I was disgusted to read about an injured British soldier being turned away from the Metro Hotel in Woking today. Regardless of the background and reasons for the current deployment of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq I fully believe that our troops deserve our full support and respect. The vast majority of us will thankfully never have to experience the horrors of war first-hand.
Maybe this story strikes a little too close to home. In the interests of full disclosure, as of the time of writing, my brother is has a month left stationed in Afghanistan before he comes home to his wife and newly born daughter. He is serving with II Para.
For some degree of gravitas I’ve included a related chain email sent to me by my sister-in-law during a particularly bad period for the British Army and the Parachute Regiments especially.
Continue reading ‘Something to think about’
On the back of the Tesco signage debate earlier this week and the BBC’s follow up on the misuse of grammar, something leapt out of John Singleton’s Boys N the Hood opening title sequence. The text stating the shocking fact that “one out of every 21 black American males will be murdered in their lifetime” confused both me and my flatmate.
Not to belittle the message but “in their lifetime”? WTF?
Like you can get murdered post-mortem?
Published on
September 2, 2008 in
Personal.
In a moment of boredom while away travelling I was reflecting on the new experiences I had encountered and started cobbling together a list of more things I wanted to do. This may sound like the plotline of The Bucket List but there are a few differences. First and foremost, I’m not terminally ill. Secondly, perhaps because I’m younger than the characters in the movie, there are more than just 12 things on my list of things to do (or see) before I die.
Continue reading ‘The List’
Last night I saw the annual Fireworks Concert that marks the end of the Edinburgh Festival. I don’t know if it was something to do with being spoilt by the Olympic fireworks or just because of the idiots around us on Calton Hill but I wasn’t as impressed as last year. Also unlike last year I somehow didn’t step foot in the Spiegeltent all month. That’s not to say that I had a quiet August of it what with leaving parties, birthdays, barbeques and the like.
My plan for the next couple of months is to get back into some semblence of fitness. I’ve not really done much exercise apart from a few short games of Ultimate since March and it’s beginning to show. I felt a very definite wobble around my middle when I was running down the stairs the other day and it didn’t feel good. However, my mum claims that she thinks that I “suit a bit of weight” and will try to stir double cream through my porage whenever I’m visiting.
The weather hasn’t exactly helped me get out and do anything as it feels like it has rained every single day since getting back from my travels. I’ve finally got around to taking my gym membership off hold so I should be able to motivate myself to do something active now that I’m paying fees once again!
